2021 was a doozy but despite setbacks and COVID interruptions in production the following selection is our combined favorites from both film and TV this year.
1. Dune
Dune part one dwells in the first third or so of the novel. It’s the set up portion of the full story, not the story itself.
Villeneuve tries to inject some narrative choice for Paul into it. That just makes the film feel even more of a set-up, a prelude to the real choices Paul is destined to make.
For the book — and even in David Lynch’s earlier theatrical adaptation — we see Paul make those choices. Here, it’s left for a second film. Villeneuve needs to be allowed to make the second film. Aside from this narrative weakness — something I wonder if most viewers will really notice — this is just an incredible piece of movie magic. A “serious” piece of SciFi that is exciting, captivating, and compelling.
It’s worth your time to see.
2. Spider-Man: No Way Home
Yes, Tobey McGuire, and Andrew Garfield are in the movie. But what was shocking is how integral to the plot and the character development that ensues after all three Peters meet. I don’t want to say much more except that the movie is truly amazing, life affirming, and reaffirms Spider-Man (Peter Parker and Miles Morales) as the beating heart of the Marvel Universe, cinematic or otherwise.
3. It’s A Sin
The five-episode series (available on HBO Max) follows a group of gay friends during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Olly Alexander, the lead singer of Years & Years, stars as Ritchie, a wannabe actor who moves to Manchester, where he finds friends, partying and a lot of sex. “I hope that young queer people watch and it gives them maybe a rich understanding of themselves and where we’ve come from,” Alexander, 30, says from his London apartment. “We’re really standing on the shoulders of everyone that came before us. And I think it’s so important to acknowledge and recognize that and there’s a lot of courage and inspiration that I take as a queer person from seeking out my own history and my elders and how I’m connected to them, and how that’s impacted my own life growing up.”
The series does not in any way sugar-coat how AIDS ripped through the gay community. “That was a very hard sell,” Davies says. “I would say how many deaths there were and I could see literally people were flinching. And I got asked, ‘Do you have to have that many?’ And I just had to go, ‘That was the experience. That is what happened.”
4. The French Dispatch
Chamalet as a student revolutionary in Wes Anderson’s ensemble comedy-drama The French Dispatch is the most wonderful part of the movie.
5. WandaVision
The emotionally satisfying conclusion to the season finale (I believe they intended this to be a self-contained mini-series, not ongoing. Disney has made clear that anything they produce for the site that’s successful will have sequels, hence the season one appellation), did not, as some suspected, open a backdoor to introduce the X-Men into the MCU proper [i.e. the appearance of Evan Peters as Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver], but was still some of the tightest storytelling we’ve seen from Marvel Studios.
I loved WandaVision. It ticked all the boxes, I was invested and it was beautiful, and I hope that WandaVision is the first step toward an MCU that doesn’t use easter eggs and character reveals as a substitute for plot.
Eddie Borey wrote on Facebook: “WandaVision is simultaneously a story about grief, an immigrant’s story, and a love letter to television. Way more ambitious than it needed to be, and I’m loving it.”
To an extent, that’s what it was, yes. A too-large extent, I’d contend. It was innovative within the context of the MCU, for sure, but not nearly as ambitious on an absolute scale. The meditations on grief were often deeply poignant (especially in this episode), but largely predictable. All of that said, the show did have something to say, and that something is terribly relevant. Around the 35-minute mark of this series finale, it struck me: This was a show that, deliberately or not, was about what it’s like to be in love at the end of the world.
6. Luca
We said:
Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe A summery coming-of-age fable might be laden with allegory, or not? In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together. That may sound roughly like the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, but it is also the story of the perhaps coincidentally named Luca, the latest bittersweet animated film from Disney and Pixar (on Disney+ June 18).
Aside from who it may or may not represent, the film is a nice introduction to summer in its intoxicating wash of blues and greens and oranges, the way it conjures up the heady momentum of youth, the thrilling rush of life’s pages turning. Luca does well in that regard, though perhaps it may be more memorable for what it might have been than for what it actually is.
Upon re-watching Luca knowing all this I still feel like it’s so good and I’m like why not just say it… in a month where nearly all of corporate America went gay-for-pay or at the very least “wokewashing/pinkwashing-whatever-the-phrase” of the moment it is— in this case, this is a movie that Pixar, Disney and anyone involved in its creation, can be proud of.
7. House of Gucci
Adam Driver (Maurizio Gucci) and Lady Gaga (Patrizia Reggiani) in HOUSE OF GUCCI Signore e Signora Gucci #HouseOfGucci A film about the tumultuous Gucci family fashion dynasty and the murder of founder Guccio Gucci’s grandson Maurizio Gucci. Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, Jack Huston
We said:
The most fun we’ve had at the movies this year.
8. Dave Chappelle: The Closer
The Closer is exactly that — the coda to a body of work that began with The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas. Those were followed by Equanimity, The Bird Revelation, Sticks & Stones, and 8:46 (released on YouTube but produced by Netflix).
To be offended by Chappelle is easy. Too easy.
It ignores too much consideration. Too much linguistic legerdemain. There’s no way that Chappelle can make a joke that at once eviscerates and elucidates the LGBT movement in the way that he has (the gays are driving the car…) without recognizing that he is someone that has put great thought and consideration into this aspect of the human condition.
It is with that same consideration that his work too must be measured.
He is a truth teller and soothsayer.
There’s an episode of Iconoclasts on Sundance Channel, right after Chappelle’s Show ended where Dave took a road trip to spend the afternoon talking with Maya Angelou. That, to me, was a defining moment in the artist Dave would become after he pushed his own brakes and changed direction.
He is also fiercely concerned with the human condition and rejects essentialism.
I believe that Chappelle’s fixation on the transgender condition arises from that rejection.
Chappelle understands ideological fluidity, and the rhetoric of the trans movement is often at odds with itself both seeking to reject essentialism and embrace fluidity but obsessed in many ways with fixed identities.
It is itself a dialectic.
Chappelle has so moved the goal posts that he is in rarified territory. He exists in a world he has almost singularly wrought.
“Punching down requires you to consider yourself superior to another group. Chappelle doesn’t consider himself better than me in any way. He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a mater of his craft.” #SticksandStones #imthatdaphne
As the world seems to be waking up to the trap of social media and the demise of Facebook, Chappelle’s line, “apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a fuck because Twitter is not a real place” could not be more accurate or factual.
To be everything to everyone is to mean nothing to no one.
Chappelle evokes James Baldwin in a deft and sublime way. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Chappelle if nothing else confronts the uncomfortable.
9. Matrix Resurrections
We said:
A worthy sequel.
10. Star Trek: Discovery, Seasons 3 & 4
From the very beginning of “Kobayashi Maru” the first episode of season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery everything feels fresh and daringly different. We’ve time jumped approximately 5 months from the end of season 3. And Captain Michael Burnham is fully in charge.
